This is an a.m. radio song
riverbed static
a shimmering Texas prairie
beneath the mirage
the Gulf of Mexico, reins, and caliche
waves of chirring heat
between crooked mud green Guadalupe
and San Antonio rivers
My Father
wheels us up secondary gravel roads
an unfolded paper map on his jeans
and the Pontiac’s fat black tires
flinging pebbles
silver hubcaps ping
headlights pouring
into black oceans
on either side
heat lighting sixty miles off
passes itself in mirrors
between dusty sheets of glass
and there are no stars
A kind of sadness forms
upon waking
when broad white morning bends
Goliad Mission’s archways
agave crackle and sway
changing nothing
Sometimes windless night air
where stars sing out our names
knows why
the Karankawa left this place
for something other than the kind of faith that brings a man to drive other men away
their rattles snake echoes
across giant stone floors where cool curls
in buried halls and wrought iron rails
sunken in mesquite
where a shadow beneath the courtyard remembers me
you cannot come back
Un-broken-in leather shoes
white 4 on a red mesh jersey
spare chaparral shade
sweat rolling and re-baking
on a little boy
Spanish medicine
for Spanish diseases and steel
their language
sung to death
in the Dog Canyon sun
beneath wheels
under this same sky
